Galaxies in fiction

M31 (Andromeda Galaxy)

Literature

• The novel Andromeda Nebula by Ivan Yefremov is named after the Andromeda Galaxy, even though the galaxy itself is only mentioned once, towards the end of the book.
• Much of the fighting in the Revelation Space universe by Alastair Reynolds is caused by one race attempting to prepare the Milky Way for the impending collision with Andromeda, and attempting to wipe out any other race to prevent them interfering.
• The Andromeda Galaxy plays an important role in the German space opera Perry Rhodan, from the third cycle on.

  Comics

• In , writer Mark Waid describes Krypton as a megagravity planet circling an M3 star in the Andromeda Galaxy.
• In Marvel Comics, the Skrull empire consists mainly of "about a thousand worlds" in the Andromeda galaxy. The Nova Corps of Xandar, and the Symbiotes of Klyntar are also from the Andromeda galaxy.
• In Schlock Mercenary, the Fleetmind Artificial Intelligence character known as Petey is currently prosecuting a war against the Paan'uri in their home galaxy of Andromeda.

  Film and television

• In the 1961 BBC television series A for Andromeda, co-authored by astronomer Fred Hoyle, a radio signal is received from the direction of the Andromeda Galaxy. The signal contained instructions for building a super-computer, as well as the code needed to make it run. A year later the sequel series The Andromeda Breakthrough was released.
• In The Galaxy Being, the debut episode of The Outer Limits , an engineer for a small radio station somehow makes contact with a peaceful alien creature from the Andromeda Galaxy, who gets transported to Earth by accident.
• In the 1968 episode "By Any Other Name", the starship Enterprise is hijacked by Kelvans, aliens from an empire spanning the Andromeda Galaxy; their home galaxy was approaching an uninhabitable state and thus they aimed to conquer our own. In another episode, I, Mudd, the lead android says their creators were humanoids from "Andromeda".
• The second season of the 1970s anime series Space Battleship Yamato featured the Comet Empire, a massive empire contained in an artificial comet, which sought to conquer Earth after having enslaved the entire Andromeda Galaxy.
• In Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda, the Systems Commonwealth had territory in the Andromeda Galaxy, the Triangulum Galaxy and the Milky Way.
• Doctor Who episodes:
• *The Ark in Space — Star Pioneers from Earth reached Andromeda, where they fought a war with the Wirrn.
• *Evolution — The Doctor takes a group of humans who have mutated into mermaids to live on a water planet in the Andromeda Galaxy.
• In the seventh episode in the first series of the British comedy sketch show Monty Python's Flying Circus, blancmanges from the planet Skyron in the Andromeda galaxy were a major plot point. For instance, they are seen to convert people into stereotypical Scotsmen in order to win the Wimbledon tennis tournament, as it was well known that the Scots cannot play tennis.
• In the Renkin 3-kyū Magical? Pokān episode "The Spell of Dreams is Magic That Lasts One Day," Aiko has Uma use the magical Happy Chalk to draw a galactic train that could take them to the Andromeda Galaxy as one of Aiko's attempts to gain a human body since she has heard about something like this happening there before. Uma draws up the galactic train and they end up riding it to the Andromeda Galaxy even getting there faster when Uma drew a turbo boose enough for a trip due to the effects of the Happy Chalk lasting until the end of the day's first use. Upon landing on a planet in the Andromeda Galaxy, Uma, Pachira, Liru, and Aiko head to the area near Andromeda Tanashi where a robot would gain a real body or vice versa. It turns out that it takes a full day in order for the body changing to occur. The princesses leave and Aiko now knows that what she heard about the Andromeda Galaxy was true all along.
• The Guardians of the Galaxy films take place primarily in the Andromeda Galaxy.
• In , the overall plot of the first season is stopping the Osmosian warlord Aggregor from gaining the powers of 5 aliens from the Andromeda Galaxy: Bivalvan, a hydrokinetic molluscan humanoid; Galapagus, a peaceful aerokinetic turtle; P'andor, an armored energy being constantly unleashing radiation and heat; Andreas, an armadillo-like being with the ability to cause earthquakes and tunnel through the ground rapidly; and Ra'ad, a jellyfish-like being with high power in controlling electricity. Ben Tennyson scans the DNA of each of them to gain Water Hazard, Terraspin, NRG, Armodrillo, and AmpFibian respectively.

  Games

• In the Star Fleet Universe games, the Andromedans launch a devastating war on the Milky Way, using the Lesser Magellanic Cloud as a stepping-stone.
• In the Sega video game series Phantasy Star, the instruction booklet of the first game states that the Algol Solar System is located deep in the Andromeda Galaxy.
• In Star Trek Online, the alien race known as the Iconians are revealed to have a Contagion |Gateway network and a Dyson Sphere in the Andromeda Galaxy, which is where they have been hiding since fleeing their homeworld in the Milky Way. Once their invasion of the Milky Way begins, the sphere teleports itself there.
• In ', the five Andromeda aliens are playable forms for Ben as Water Hazard, Terraspin, NRG, Armodrillo, and AmpFibian.
• In the Space Quest series, there are recurring characters, who are the alter egos of the creators, called the Two Guys from Andromeda.
• In ', the Andromeda Galaxy is referenced when a message regarding the "closing" of the Milky Way Galaxy server is issued to all Eternal Sphere players. Due to the player party's emergence into 4D space from the Milky Way server of the Eternal Sphere MMO, all current players in that server are advised to relocate to the Andromeda server, which houses its titular galaxy.
• , a video game developed by BioWare Montreal and published by Electronic Arts. The game is a spin-off of the original Mass Effect trilogy, set 600 years following the events of Mass Effect 2. In the game, each race participating in the initiative sends a large ship, called an Ark, on a 600-year voyage to Andromeda. Each ship contains the races' best and brightest volunteers, suspended in cryosleep. The player takes control of one of the customizable Ryder twins and becomes the "Pathfinder", responsible for making decisions in how the humans will settle the new galaxy, and how humanity will help find the other races' missing arks.

  Music

• The Andromeda galaxy has also featured heavily in the central theme of Enigma's sixth album A Posteriori, in which a collision involving the Milky Way is prophesied to occur in the distant future. The most explicit reference to this appears at the album's close with a doom-laden yet mysterious statement, suggesting a collision of the galaxies will give rise to a "new, gigantic cosmic world" being born.
• M31 appears in the song "Out of the White Hole" of the album by Ayreon.
• In the story of the ship named Iron Savior, as told by the band Iron Savior, in the Andromeda Galaxy there is a region of space called the Realm Of Steel, with a Machine World at its center. Both the Realm Of Steel and the Machine World are feared by the rest of the galaxy.
• "Andromeda" is the title of the first released single from the 2019 album Titanic Rising by American musician Weyes Blood.

  Large Magellanic Cloud

• In the comedy film My Stepmother Is an Alien, the Clouds of Megallan is a galaxy 92 light-years from Earth, and the home world of the alien Celeste Martin.
• In Olaf Stapledon's 1937 science fiction novel Star Maker, there is a group of aliens that live in the Large Magellanic Cloud called the Symbiotics, a super-intelligent symbiotic race composed of telepathically linked arachnoid beings and whale-like ichthyoid beings. The "Symbiotics" are the most advanced intelligent life in the Milky Way Galaxy and its satellite galaxies. The reason is because they combine the manipulative tool-using intelligence of the arachnoids with the contemplative meditative and mathematical intelligence of the ichthyoids. The "Symbiotics" travel in starships equipped with tanks of water for the ichthyoids and piloted by the arachnoids. They conduct vast terraforming projects, terraforming planets in numerous different planetary systems. They also construct large artificial planetoids, hollow spheres filled with water inhabited on the inside by the icthyoids and on the surface by the arachnoids. They have the most advanced and powerful telepathic powers of any race in our galaxy and its satellites and are thus able to stop the War of Galactic Empires within the Milky Way Galaxy by telepathically attacking the military forces of the various Galactic Empires and causing them to have doubts about imperialism. This causes the various Imperial military forces to become totally disorganized. The Galaxy is led into a new era of galactic peace supervised by the democratic and communistic Galactic Community of Worlds, which emerges after the fall of the Galactic Empires.
• The Large Magellanic Cloud is the destination of the spacecraft Yamato in the first season of the 1970s anime series Space Battleship Yamato. The LMC is the host galaxy for the destination, Iscandar, and the home planet of the alien force attacking Earth, Gamilas. The Yamato must use an untested faster-than-light drive to make the 296,000 light year round trip in one Earth year.
• In Scientology, these are said to be literal clouds. They are involved in the fictional story of Helatrobus.
• In Marvel Comics, the Large Magellanic Cloud is home to the Kree empire but its territory may extend into other galaxies.
• In Arthur C Clarke's novel Rendezvous with Rama, the giant spaceship Rama is at the end directed towards the Large Magellanic Cloud. Its journey through the solar system was apparently just to use the Sun to refuel and as a gravitational slingshot.
• In The Forever War, a 1974 science fiction novel by Joe Haldeman, a significant battle takes place on a 'collapsar' portal planet in the Large Magellanic Cloud.
• In James Blish's series Cities in Flight, hero John Amalfi and the New Earth planet escape to the Greater Magellenic Cloud to avoid unjust prosecution for an atrocity.
• In the Robert Silverberg novel Collision Course, a wayward space ship trying to fly back to Earth gets lost in "null-space" and ends up emerging into normal space within the Large Magellanic Cloud; the captain suggests they find a permanent home there as their chances of getting home are extremely remote and they are fortunate to have dropped into normal space within a galaxy. Ultimately, they are returned to the Milky Way by sympathetic, superior aliens. The Milky Way galaxy is easily visible, evoking a feeling of loneliness and separation when the crew realize they're looking at their home galaxy.
• In the game Infinite Space, the main character flees to the Large Magellanic Cloud after the civilizations of the Small Magellanic Cloud are taken over by an invading empire. Most of the second half of the game is spent in this galaxy.
• In the ' roleplaying game, the Faraway system is located in the Large Magellanic Cloud.
• In Halo, the parasitic Flood was said to have come from Large Magellanic Cloud on ancient cargo ships. In the novel ', Forerunners were revealed to have chased the surviving Precursors to the Magellanic Cloud during a Forerunner war and ruthlessly killed off nearly the entire species. The Forerunners that committed this act were ashamed and lived the rest of their lives on a planet in the Magellanic Cloud.
• In the soundtrack of the game Starbound, there is a song titled "Large Magellanic Cloud".
• In The Mixed Men fix-up by A. E. van Vogt, the culture clash between imperial Earth and the local colonies propelling the plot happens in the Large Magellanic Cloud.
• In Beyond the Aquila Rift by Alastair Reynolds a faster than light travel accident sends the protagonist not merely beyond the titular "Aquila Rift", but to the Large Magellanic Cloud. Dealing with the reality that hundreds of years have passed outside of FTL travel is a key point of the story.
• In The Magellanic Journey, a 2019 science fiction novella by Eder Nogueira, a crew of space pirates led by a former scientist discovers a secret wormhole on Mercury that leads to the Large Magellanic Cloud. Travelling through several planetary systems in the galaxy, the crew encounters some extraterrestrial creatures, including a primitive sapient species that worships the Milky Way, and the remnants of an extinct galactic empire.

  Small Magellanic Cloud

• The Small Magellanic Cloud is the site of the climax of Robert A. Heinlein's novel Have Space Suit—Will Travel, in which the spectacular view of the Milky Way is admired.
• In two Star Trek books from Pocket Books – : The Sundered and : The Red King, the Small Magellanic Cloud is home to the Neyel, an offshoot of humanity who dominated several species native to the Cloud.
• The Small Magellanic Cloud is the location of an Alderson disk onto which the surface of Cold War-era Earth is transplanted in Charles Stross's short story "Missile Gap."
• In the Star Fleet Universe, the Small Magellanic Cloud is home to a number of starfaring empires; such as the Baduvai Imperium, the Eneen Protectorates and the Maghadim Hives. All of these empires were conquered by the Andromedans, who then used the Cloud as a jumping off point into the Milky Way. The Cloud was eventually liberated from Andromedan rule in Operation Unity; a coalition of task forces sent by the Federation, Klingons and other Alpha Octant powers.
• Iain M. Banks' novel The Player of Games is partially set in the Empire of Azad in the Small Magellanic Cloud.
• In Dan Simmons' Hyperion series, the planet Earth is thought swallowed up by a black hole but is actually transported to somewhere within the Lesser Magellanic Cloud.
• In Edmond Hamilton's Star Kings series, a race of powerful telepaths called H'Harn originated in the Small Magellanic Cloud and has made two attempts to conquer the Milky Way Galaxy.
• Salo, the space traveler stranded on Titan in Kurt Vonnegut's The Sirens of Titan, hails from the fictional planet Tralfamadore, located in the Small Magellanic Cloud.

  M33 ('Triangulum Galaxy')

• In the novel Voyage of the Space Beagle by A.E. Van Vogt, the starship Space Beagle is sent out by Earth to investigate alien life forms. When it reaches the M33 galaxy in Triangulum, it encounters an enormous disembodied life form called The Anabis that covers the entire galaxy. "The Anabis" turns planets into jungle planets because it lives off the life force of living beings when they die and jungle planets have the highest rate of ecological energetics. Since "The Anabis" has destroyed civilized planets in this way, the crew of the starship devises a way to defeat this being.
• In the fictional Star Trek universe, the Triangulum Galaxy is where the USS Enterprise-D is warped to after a being known as The Traveler uses his knowledge to influence the ship's warp drive. M33 is said to be approximately 2.7 million light years away from the United Federation of Planets territories, or about three hundred years' travel time for the Federation's most advanced vessels. The galaxy was first encountered in the ' episode "Where No One Has Gone Before".
• In the Star Fleet Universe, the Triangulum Galaxy was once dominated by a now-defunct precursor empire; the civil war, which tore the Old Empire asunder, left two major successor states picking up the pieces. Another elder species, the Helgardians, appeared in M33 at the same time; in the modern era, an array of younger powers would emerge on the back of Helgardian-traded warp technology.
• The second season finale of seaQuest DSV featured the seaQuest being transported to the planet Hyperion, over eleven million light years away from Earth in the Triangulum Galaxy.
• On Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda the Systems Commonwealth had territory in the Triangulum Galaxy in addition to the Andromeda and Milky Way Galaxies. The new homeworld of which, Tarazed, was located in this Galaxy.
• In the Belgian comic book series Yoko Tsuno written by Roger Leloup, M33 is the home of the blue-skinned Vineans, whom the main characters befriend. About a third of the stories take place in this galaxy.
• In the Orion's Arm universe, the Triangulum galaxy is home to an extra-galactic civilization, having sent a powerful warning message about a massive artificial object heading towards the local group several million years ago.
• In the 2004 Iain M. Banks novel The Algebraist, the Triangulum Nebula was the starting point of the Long Crossing, a 30-million-year journey undertaken by the Dweller civilization to return to the world of Nasqueron where much of the novel is set.
• In the Crysis video game series, the alien antagonists, named the "Ceph", originate from this galaxy.
• The 2000 computer game Gunman Chronicles takes place in M33, where humanity has established multiple colonies and has the ability to trigger supernovae.
• In March 2012 the news satire website The Onion reported that a fleet of warships from the planet Zarklan 12 in the Triangulum Galaxy has arrived at Earth to intervene in the Syrian War on the side of the Syrian rebel alliance. "Supreme Emperor and Dynastic Overlord Thuu'l", the Onion reported, is disturbed by Earth's apathy toward the massacres of innocent Syrians.
• The promotional posters for the movie E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial give the phrase "three million lightyears from home", leading many to believe that the title character hails from M33. Furthermore, the Easter egg of E.T.'s race appearing in ' have many Star Wars fans pointing to M33 as the "galaxy far, far away".
• In the 2016 Al DesHotel novel 235, The Triangulum Galaxy was a destination for exploration by the Alaytion Empire by the Emperor Kaajii Morrell.

  'Pegasus Galaxy'

• The Pegasus Dwarf Irregular Galaxy is the "Pegasus Galaxy" in which the television series Stargate Atlantis takes place.

  M51 ('Whirlpool Galaxy')

• The Whirlpool Galaxy or M51 was used as the basis for the galaxy in which the story of the Homeworld series of games takes place. The original Homeworld game takes the player on a journey from the galaxy's outer rim to its core; this is accurately illustrated by the background images as the game campaign progresses.
• The Whirlpool Galaxy appears in the video game Ōkami, where it is summoned by the main character, Amaterasu, to create a whirlpool in the ocean that she uses to travel to an aquatic palace.
• The three teenage alien protagonists of the Roswell —itself a spin-off of the Roswell High novels—are said to come from the Five Worlds of the Whirlwind Galaxy.
• The Whirlpool Galaxy or M51 appears in the novels The Genesis Quest and Second Genesis by Donald Moffitt. In the novels, future humans beam the sum of human knowledge towards the Virgo supercluster, which is received and understood by aliens in the intervening M51 galaxy. The information, 37 million years after transmission, is used for the aliens to reconstruct mankind long after they ceased to exist in the Milky Way galaxy.

  M81

• In the fictional Star Fleet Universe, M81 is the home galaxy for a number of star-faring species, including the Tholians, the Nebuline, the Seltorians, and the Bolosco.

  M83

• The French synthpop band M83 is named after this galaxy.
• The band Clutch makes reference to M83 in their song Spacegrass off their self-titled album.

"Hey kid, are you going my way?
Hop in, we'll have ourselves a field day.
We'll find us some spacegrass,
Lay low, watch the universe expand.
Skyway, permanent Saturday.
Oh, by the way, Saturn is my rotary.
Hop in, it'll be eternity
Till we make it to M83."

M86

• In the TV show Andromeda, M86 is cited as being the origin of the Magog invasion of the three galaxies in the season 2 opener "The Widening Gyre".

  Wolf-Lundmark-Melotte Galaxy

• Part of the Lensman series by E. E. Smith takes place in Lundmark's Nebula. This is a clear reference to astronomer Knut Lundmark whose particular area of specialization was the study of galaxies, and may refer to the Wolf-Lundmark-Melotte Galaxy. — albeit this hypothesis would be contradicted by the series establishing material stating that "Lundmark's Nebula" and the Milky Way Galaxy collided "edge-on" during the "planet-forming era, as well as by stated discrepancies in the books regarding distances and structures compared to the real Wolf-Lundmark-Melotte."
• The Doctor Who novel Synthespians™ by Craig Hinton refers to the New Earth Republic of the 101st Century and beyond, which spearheads a programme of colonisation, sending sleeper ships to the Wolf-Lundmark-Melotte galaxy and Andromeda.

  [Sculptor Dwarf Galaxy]

• Doctor Who novel The Eyeless is set in this Galaxy, which is referred to as the Seventh Galaxy. In other stories the Seventh Galaxy is mentioned as the location of Skaro, home planet of the Daleks.

  Other galaxies

Fictional galaxies

• Murray Leinster's novel The Last Spaceship has escapees from our galaxy founding a new civilization in a remote galaxy.
• The Stargate movie and television series feature several fictional galaxies, including the Kaliem galaxy, in which the planet Abydos is located in the film, and the Ida galaxy, home of the Asgard alien species. The Ori in Stargate SG-1 come from another unnamed galaxy that's in a different supercluster of Galaxies, and use the Supergate to travel to the Milky Way galaxy.
• In Marvel Comics, the Shi'ar Imperium is within a region referred to as the "Shi'ar Galaxy" and is controlled by the Shi'ar race. As this region is said to be situated close to the Skrull and Kree Empires mentioned above, and is one of the three main alien empires of the Marvel Universe, the home of the Shi'ar empire may actually be the Triangulum Galaxy or one of the many dwarf galaxies within the Local Group. The Black Galaxy is the home of Ego the Living Planet.
• Star Wars is set "A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away...".
• In the Superman film series, Krypton is said to be located in the "Xeno Galaxy".
• In the Doctor Who series, the Face of Boe is said to be the oldest living inhabitant of the Isop galaxy. The insectoid inhabitants of the planet Vortis were also from the Isop galaxy. Representatives of the six "Outer Galaxies" meet in The Daleks' Master Plan.
• In , Terra Venture and the Lost Galaxy Rangers travel to the 'Lost Galaxy', a galaxy that seems to exist outside our dimension and which can only be reached by portal. After many adventures in this galaxy Terra Venture and the Rangers escape the Lost Galaxy through a portal opened by reciting the Lost Galaxy Spell backwards.
• In the book Skylark of Valeron, the protagonists visit another galaxy after being rotated through the fourth dimension and visit a number of different galaxies in the last book in the series, Skylark DuQuesne.
• The finale of the 2007 anime series Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann features the titular mecha as being larger than a galaxy, and capable of wielding small galaxies as deadly projectiles.
• In the Mel Brooks film Spaceballs Captain Lone Starr hails from the 'Ford' galaxy, in reference both to Harrison Ford and the automobile Ford Galaxie.
• Insomniac Games' popular video game franchise 'Ratchet & Clank' features three fictional galaxies called the Solana Galaxy, the Bogon Galaxy, and the Polaris Galaxy.
• In the 1956 book Islands of Space the protagonists are lost in space and ask the astronomers of a planet in another galaxy to help them find the Milky Way by looking for a spiral galaxy with two small satellite galaxies, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds.
• In Episode 1.21 of The Outer Limits, "The Children of Spider County," the alien/human hybrids are said to be from the Krell Galaxy.
• In Space Battleship Yamato, the final major battle before reaching Gamilas/Iscandar is said to occur in what the characters call "The Rainbow Galaxy". However, onscreen, this looked more like a group of planetary masses than an actual galaxy. Presumably, the name comes from the different color of the different planets. This designation was only used in the English language Star Blazers. In the original Japanese Yamato, it was properly called the Rainbow System.
• In the lore of space MMORPG EVE Online humanity has colonized a distant galaxy named "New Eden", where the game takes place.
• Dimension X in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles stories is in some TMNT versions thought to be a galaxy. This is especially featured in the TMNT Adventures comic book.
• In the space exploration game No Mans' Sky, the player starts the game on one of the many planets in the .